MIDTOWN EAST—A tipster follows up yesterday's update on the maybe/maybe-not 250 East 57th Street with this tidbit: "I live next door to the site (one of my walls is adjoining the school slated for demolition) and last week workers from the construction company came in to take pictures of my apartment (to make sure I can't wrongfully sue for any damages incurred during demolition, of course!). They said that demolition of the elementary school should be starting in the next few weeks."

A new rendering has been produced for the mixed-use project on the southwest corner of 57th Street and Second Avenue that will replace the low-rise High School of Art and Design and Public School 59.

A new school will occupy part of the new structure's 11-story base that will also include 166,000 square feet of retail space including a 47,00-square-foot Whole Foods store.

The top 59 floors of the project will have residential bases.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is the architect and the World Wide Group is the developer.

The glass-clad tower will have steeply-angled facades that will radically alter its appearance from different directions and will seem to have an extreme hour-glass pinched figure.

A $4.2 billion air rights agreement to build an educational, residential and retail complex at 250 East 57th Street in Manhattan has recently been closed, according to real estate and construction law firm Anderson Kill who directed the deal.

The project, which is a collaboration between the New York City Educational Construction Fund and the World Wide Group, includes a new 1,400-student high school that will replace the existing High School for Art and Design, a new 730-seat elementary school, the retail space and a 488,000 sq-ft, 320-unit residential tower.

World-Wide Group recently completed construction on a school on East 63rd Street, located at the converted Annex of the Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital, which will house PS 59 during the construction phases. After PS 59 relocates to its newly renovated home on 57th Street, the 63rd Street site will continue to serve as a new neighborhood school.

"We're enthusiastic and honored to be working with the ECF to build new schools, new retail and new housing that will revitalize and energize this important intersection of the Upper East Side," said Julia Hodgson, director of development for The World-Wide Group.

About 20 percent of the 320 rental units will be affordable housing and the project will also utilize the Inclusionary Housing Program, according to developers World Wide Group, which will result in approximately 30 additional affordable units within Community Board #6 limits.

The Educational Construction Fund was created in 1966 and it best known for its mixed-use developments such as the office-building/Norman Thomas High School on the southeast corner of Park Avenue and 34th Street and the apartment building/Robert F. Kennedy School on 88th Street between Park and Lexington Avenues.

Marketing began today on $53 million in city-backed bonds to help finance construction of new public schools at World Wide Group's mixed-use project at Second Avenue between East 56th and 57th Streets -- just as local businesses and residents warned that a proposed city water-main project astride the site will create a "war zone."

The debt offering, reported by The Bond Buyer yesterday, is through the New York City Education Construction Fund, an agency controlled by the mayor's office. The ECF and developer World Wide are in a "partnership" on the project, which will ultimately include a 350-unit luxury apartment tower, two new schools and retail space including a giant Whole Foods.